20060831

The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of history.

The level of anti-Israel, anti-American madness has reached such a pitch in Britain that any similar expression of alarm at the manifestly blatant mendacity in the reporting of the Middle East has simply become unthinkable.

In short, much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the western media would perpetrate such institutionalised mendacity. Many ancillary reasons come to mind. There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists’ fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organisations. There is the language barrier; there is professional laziness; there is the naïve inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity; there is the moral inversion of the left which believes that western truth-tellers automatically tell lies, while third world liars automatically tell the truth.

But the big answer is that the western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that’s because the Big Lie these media tell — and have themselves been told — about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that’s because that’s how editors think of the Middle East: that the whole ghastly mess is driven by Israel’s actions, and that therefore it is only Israel’s aggression which is the story to be covered. Thus history is inverted, half a century of Jewish victimisation is erased from public consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors and genocidal mass murderers turned into victims, and ignorance and prejudice stalk England’s once staunch and stalwart land...

...that thousands of rockets were fired at northern Israel, hundreds every day, many times more than were daily fired at Britain during the Blitz — that’s why none of this was reported in Britain (where as a result such facts, when now related, are received with open-mouthed astonishment) because journalists were told to ignore it allsince that wasn’t the story their editors wanted. Israel’s victimisation simply was not, could not, be the story. The only story was Israel’s aggression. But that story is a Big Lie. So a host of lies were transmitted to support it.

...The mainstream media must now be regarded as active accessories to the war being waged against the free world and therefore as a fifth column in that world – an enemy within.

Fourth, the impact of the lies and distortions transmitted by the mainstream media in inflaming the already pathological hatred of the west within the Arab and Muslim world is incalculable.

Fifth, the mainstream media’s vilification, demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel, based on outright fabrications and malevolent distortions, is imperilling the very existence of the country that is the front line of defence of the free world.

Sixth, that vilification is also imperilling the safety and well-being of Jewish communities around the world, subject now to the double victimisation of attack by Islamists and attack by non-Muslims for belonging to a Jewish people that refuses to submit passively to a second attempt at genocidal slaughter and instead fights to defend itself.

To date, as far as I can determine, not one mainstream editor or proprietor has acknowledged this corruption of the western media. The scale of this corruption now threatens to have a lethal impact on the course of human history. Hatred now drives not just the jihadists but their western dupes, too. Truth and freedom are indivisible. The deconstruction of the former inevitably presages the destruction of the latter. This is the way a civilisation dies.

20060830

'Was the Invasion of Iraq a Jewish or a Big Oil Conspiracy?' by Greg Palast in Tikkun Magazine:

Bush world is divided in two: neocons on one side, and the Establishment (which includes the oil companies and the Saudis) on the other. The plan the Establishment created, crafted by Houston oil men, called for locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new state oil company under "profit-sharing agreements" with "IOCs" (International Oil Companies). The combine could "enhance [Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC," it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices.

So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neocon clique—bookish, foolish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.

Between the neocons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon.

Far from editorializing that "We are all British now," the American media might well have reacted to 8/27 by saying, "The British are all suspects now." The Atlantic would have drastically widened...

Moreover, whereas 9/11 united Americans (albeit ephemerally), Britain would have been torn apart by 8/27. According to a YouGov poll published in Friday's Daily Telegraph, nearly one in five people believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared tocondone or even carry out acts of terrorism." Five years ago, only 32% of those polled said they felt "threatened" by Islam; today, that figure is 53%. The feeling of alienation is decidedly mutual. A recent Pew global survey found that 81% of British Muslims consider themselves to be Muslims first and Britishsecond. (Only Pakistan, at 87%, has a higher percentage of people who put their religion ahead of their nationality.)...

Last week, New York Magazine asked a diverse group of journalists to answer the question: "What if 9/11 never happened?" It inspired some fascinating answers. But the question "What if 8/27 had happened?" is much more important — because sooner or later something like it is bound to happen for real.

20060829

Kashmir on the Thames. London Broil. Bergen & Cruickshank in The New Republic:

The danger to the United States of the nexus between British Pakistanis, Al Qaeda, and Kashmir is becoming clear...

According to The Daily Telegraph, In March 2006, British citizen Mohammed Ajmal Khan was a frequentvisitor to the United States and talked about attacking U.S. synagogues.American prosecutors say Khan was in touch with a group of Virginia militants also tied to LeT...

Of more concern, then, is the likelihood that British Pakistanis will continue to target Americans--bothin the United States and abroad....Great Britain must step up efforts to identify its own citizens who attend Kashmiri or Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan...

Unfortunately, there are limits to what the British government can do alone. It will need help from moderate Muslims, some of whom are waking up to the threat posed by the radicals in their midst.

"These people are ill," says Ghulam Rabbani, the imam of the mosque adjoining the Fitness Centre, where the Saviour Sect held meetings. "I say very categorically and very clearly that they are misguided and they don't know the basics of Islam."

Rabbani faces a steep challenge: According to a recent poll, a full quarter of British Muslimsconsider the 2005 London bombings justified. And anyone who doubts how dangerous the intersection of such sentiments, Al Qaeda, and Kashmiri militants can be should consider what became of Omar Sheikh, the former London School of Economics student who won his freedom on New Year's Eve in 1999: Two years later, he was under arrest for orchestrating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

20060828

World Jewish Congress leaders from the US and Europe met Sunday with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and others Israeli officials for "marathon consultations" following a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the Diaspora sparked by the military conflagration in Lebanon.

In a press release, the WJC stated that "the war in Lebanon is affecting Jewish communities worldwide. According to data collected over recent weeks in the offices of the WJC, it appears that a drastic deterioration has occurred in the security of dozens of small Jewish communities around the world.

"Additionally, heads of Jewish communities have recently alerted leaders of the WJC to a new wave of anti-Semitic incidents around the world, making it apparent that many Jews feel insecure, isolated and abandoned."

...The international media has attacked the bloggers. They are brushed off as "Israel supporters," and "right-wing extremists." The aim of these brush-offs is to convince "right thinking" citizens that they oughtn't have anything to do with these champions of truth and human decency.

As each day passes, the governments, formal and informal legal apparatuses, and media of free societies show themselves to be less and less capable of contending with the information operations conducted against their societies by subversive forces seeking their destruction.

As each day passes it becomes clear thatthe responsibility of protecting our nations and societies from internal disintegration has passed to the hands of individuals, often working alone, who refuse to accept the degradation of their societies and so fight with the innovative tools of liberty to protect our way of life. The vigilance of just a handful of bloggers brought us the knowledge of the corruption of our media and the network of global NGOs that we have come to rely on to tell us the "objective" truth.

It is up to all citizens of the free world, who value our freedom to recognize this corruption, applaud the bloggers and join them in refusing to allow these corrupt institutions to cloud our commitment to freedom.

White guilt in the West--especially in Europe and on the American left--confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism--not their continuance--forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.

But the international left is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today's world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor--which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.

Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel's historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history.

IDF Captain (Reserve) and screenwriter, Dan Gordon, ('Hurricane' Carter) who fought during the recent war points-out how Israel achieved its mission goals:

When one is faced with an apocalyptic fascist enemy which not only employs a terrorist foreign legion to do its bidding, but seeks to acquire nuclear weapons which it clearly announces will be part of its strategy to wipe you and your country, your family and all your loved ones off the face of the earth, there is no proportional response.

Just as the Spanish Civil War was a preview of what European Fascism had in store for the world, so do I believe, that Iran’s offensive against Israel carried out by its Terrorist Army operational arm, was a preview of what Islamofacsism has in store not only for the West but for the moderate regimes of the Middle East, which in case anyone forgot to notice, controls the oil on which the West survives.

What they failed to gain militarily they accomplished through the manipulation of the Western Media, which were their willing dupes and through the ineptitude and weakness, if not down right appeasement of the political leadership of the International community. This has all but guaranteed that this war will be but round one.

20060824

The alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners and last year's terrorist attacks on London have made more people fear Islam as a religion, not merely its extremist elements, a poll for The Daily Telegraph has found.

A growing number of people fear that the country faces "a Muslim problem" and more than half of the respondents to the YouGov survey said that Islam posed a threat to Western liberal democracy. That compares with less than a third after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America five years ago.

More than half of respondents felt that Islam posed a threat

The findings were revealed as Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, conceded that the multi-culturalist approach encouraged by the Left for two decades had probably been a mistake and could have contributed to the alienation that many young Muslims said they felt and experienced.

The YouGov survey confirms ministers' fears that the country is becoming polarised between Muslims and the rest of the population, which is suspicious of them, and that a belief in "a clash of civilisations" has taken root.

Since a similar poll was conducted after the July 7 bombings in London last year, there has been a significant increase in the number of people worried about some of their Muslim compatriots.

The proportion of those who believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has nearly doubled from 10 per cent a year ago to 18 per cent now.

The number who believe that "practically all British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who deplore terrorist acts as much as any- one else" has fallen from 23 per cent in July last year to 16 per cent. However, there remains strong opposition to the security profiling of airline passengers based on their ethnicity or religion.

A higher proportion than last year now feels that the police and MI5 should focus their counter-terrorism efforts on Muslims and far fewer people are worried that such an approach risks dividing the country or offending law-abiding Muslims.

Most strikingly, there has been a substantial increase over the past five years in the numbers who appear to subscribe to a belief in a clash of civilisations. When YouGov asked in 2001 whether people felt threatened by Islam, as distinct from fundamentalist Islamists, only 32 per cent said they did. That figure has risen to 53 per cent.

Five years ago, a majority of two to one thought that Islam posed no threat, or only a negligible one, to democracy. Now, by a similar ratio, people think it is a serious threat.

The European Union is supposed to have traded in war, nationalism and conflict for love, peace and federalism. But Israel now reminds Europeans of darker forces and darker days.

Attitudes to America have also clouded European views, especially on the left. As Israel has drawn closer to America in the past few decades, the left's antipathy towards the behemoth of capitalism has spilled into dislike of Israel.

The number of attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions spikes at a time of violence in the Middle East, as people sympathetic to the Arab cause often take out their anger at Israel on Jews closer to home.

Jews in Europe typically bear the brunt of attacks far more than U.S. Jews. After the Palestinian intifada began in September 2000, anti-Semitic incidents in Europe skyrocketed.

Britain in particular has seen a spike in anti-Semitic incidents following the start of the war in Lebanon. The Community Security Trust, which monitors the security of British Jewry, has recorded at least 90 such incidents during July, says Mark Gardner, the group’s spokesman.

In an average month, when tensions in the Middle East are not running high, Gardner says the Trust records 20-40 anti-Semitic incidents. During the 1990s, before the intifada, those figures were substantially lower, some 15-25 per month.

In Britain, anti-Israel sentiment has become conflated with anti-Semitism, he says. This results in Jews becoming scapegoats for Israeli policy, and increases their chances of coming under attack.

The incidents are primarily nonviolent and tend to involve abusive rhetoric, threats, e-mails and graffiti.

There’s “a range of things being said,” Gardner says, “most commonly, sympathy for Hezbollah and calling Israel ‘Nazis,’ and at the same time saying Hitler should have finished off the Jews.” ...

Gardner calls conflicts in the Middle East “trigger events.” When accusations against Israel intensify — some in Britain have accused Israel recently of propagating a massacre in Lebanon — people “take their hatred out on any Jew they can find,” Gardner says.

Related OpEd in Sunday Times of London:"In last week’s paper we covered the desecration of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, the vandalism of Jewish shops and synagogues from Sydney to Rome, and Mel Gibson’s outburst about Jews being “responsible for all the wars in the world”. We also reported on growing evidence of anti-semitic attacks in Britain including the swastikas and phrase “Kill all Jews” daubed onto a Jewish doctor’s home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

That, in essence, is why what unites British Jews matters more at a time like this than what divides us. Because, as a rabbi reminded me last week, when a Lebanese-born Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 85 Jews in Argentina 12 years ago, he didn’t stop to inquire where they each stood on the war. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2300377,00.html

20060813

In World Net Daily, authoress Ilana Mercer challenges The Economist's explanations of lobbying, evangelicals, and high-tech media culture with America's founding, Jewish principals of equality before the law.

"Because freedom from slavery and oppression were dominant themes in the Old Testament," wrote Russell Kirk in "The Roots of American Order," "the legacy of Israel and Judah nourished American liberty." The Torah, or the Law – "the moral commandments revealed to Moses upon Mount Sinai" – were guiding principles to early Americans. According to Kirk, "The American moral order could not have come into existence at all, had it not been for the legacy left by Israel."

Indeed, the American founders had a deep affinity for – and knowledge of – the Mosaic faith and morals. In the Israelites, they saw a people that had set up a political order that was unique in the ancient world for the "existence of a partial check upon civil authority," said Kirk.

In the prophets, in particular – from Amos to the second Isaiah – John Adams saw exemplars for American order, political and private. "The great prophets restrained the kings' ambitions," and constantly rebuked the king and the people for their transgressions (at great personal risk).For the greater part of its history, Israel lived without a state (i.e., a monarch). But when they did form one, "their one clear political principle was a religious doctrine. The human rulers of this people … remain subordinate to God and they are judged by the degree of their fidelity to the indissoluble covenant between God and his people."

"A vast majority of Americans at the time of the framing of the Constitution" were intimately familiar with the Law and the teachings of the prophets. These laws, in Kirk's telling, were "not a set of harsh prohibitions imposed by an arbitrary tribal deity. Instead they are liberating rules that enable people to diminish the tyranny of sin; that teach people how to live with one another and in relation to God, how to restrain violence and fraud, how to know justice and to raise themselves above the level of predatory animals."

20060812

First and foremost, Israel has sent a loud and clear message that any terrorist entity that carries out an act of aggression will pay a heavy price.

Moreover, we have proven that a "spoiled" Western society, as Hizbullah perceived Israel, can withstand barrages of rocket-fire on its civilians and still maintain an unfaltering resolution to stand up and fight.Second, by exerting heavy military pressure on Hizbullah and the Lebanese government, we forced the collapse of Nasrallah's strategy that was based on unaccountability and terror-deterrence.

We helped people across the globe world understand the extent of the threat that Iranian radicalism poses to the entire free world, and why it is so important to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power.

We exposed Syria's role in supporting terror - both by facilitating the transport of Iranian weapons to Hizbullah, and by supplying its own heavy, long-range rockets and other weaponry to this terror organization. You might be surprised to know that until this war, the international community had refused to acknowledge that Syria supplied these rockets to Hizbullah.

We have shown how irresponsible the Russians were in supplying Syria with state-of-the-art weapons that have ended up in the hands of Hizbullah.

We helped the world to better understand the dangers posed by Hizbullah's fundamentalist brainwashing machine. In terms of the systematic and deliberate killing of civilians, the difference between Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah and Nazi Germany is that while the SS sought to conceal its deeds - including from German society - Hizbullah proudly proclaims its successes in killing Jewish civilians. This stream of distorted Islamist extremism is cut from the same cloth of twisted ideology to which the planners of the thwarted terror attacks on airliners flying out of London subscribe.

20060810

The latest flare-up in a 59 years long war to wipe the Jewish state off the map of the world is fast approaching its expected closure. Israel is once again being forced to leave the job of eliminating the Islamist threat unfinished. The world's powers, blinded by their anti-Semitism, politico-commercial considerations, and regional agendas, want Israel to stop pursuing its legitimate campaign to secure itself by eradicating the Islamist threat from its door steps: they want an immediate cease-fire. ...

This war has already laid the foundations of a revolutionary change in theregion. The Muslim world will never be the same. Observers watching the recentdevelopments on the Muslim street have no doubt that a new Middle East is beingborn. But if a premature cease-fire is imposed on the Middle East, it will bevery different from what US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has in mind.

20060803

"...Friends said that Dave Lalchuk was not the sort of man to run away or alter his routine because of the Katyushas. Despite the numerous rocket hits in the area, he continued working in the citrus groves and caring for the animals he loved, including his beloved dog, Blackie.

The ambulance crew and kibbutz members who rushed to the scene found the dog lying by the body in a state of great distress. Kibbutz members tried to remove the dog from the scene, but Blackie insisted on remaining beside his friend. Even once the body was removed, the dog refused to budge from the spot for a long time.

Avi, a Nahariya resident and Lalchuk's best friend, could not keep from crying, as did police officers at the scene...."

20060802

Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often caused by bad men as they are by good men who are silent when opinions must be voiced.

"The shame is that so few say 'shame"

From the Los Angeles Times-PATRICK GOLDSTEIN- "THE BIG PICTURE"

"...When an actor-director who has won an Oscar, had a string of action hits and made "The Passion of the Christ," one of the biggest-grossing movies in recent history, has an anti-Semitic hissy fit, the Big Kahunas of Hollywood are silent. DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, Warners' Barry Meyer, Universal's Ron Meyer, Paramount's Brad Grey — the list goes on and on — are happy to weigh in on censorship and movie piracy. But bad behavior by a big movie star? Not a chance.

Not to let Gibson off the hook, since he is the real bad guy here, but the silence of Hollywood Jews has been responsible for many of the most shameful chapters in industry history. When Hitler was killing Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, Hollywood studio chiefs were largely mum, rarely giving money to Jewish refugees or — God forbid — making movies about the subject until long after all 6 million Jews were dead.

It's telling that she (Sony Pictures' chairwoman, Amy Pascal) didn't say she was outraged; she said she was disappointed in Gibson. I feel the same way about her studio peers. Once again, Hollywood had a chance to do the right thing, and once again it flunked the test. "